It’s been a while since my last post. In between the old day job, travel, and looking for a new day job, I’ve been helping out with a project called Burnout.io, which is focused on providing resources to help mitigate IT-related workplace burnout. I became involved with the project after my friend Mike Julian pointed me to the site.
A little over a year ago, I found myself in a bit of a bad place and to be honest, was there for the last couple of months. My time at my previous two jobs had been spent ticket crunching and burning through the never-ending firehose of requests that come with being a support tech. The last several years at Rackspace have been a delicate balance between being able to learn and grow, and do the day-to-day work of customer requests. It left me tired, bored, and disengaged, both at work and home.
I took the time during Christmas vacation to reconnect a bit with the project that helped center me this time a year ago. I started digging through the issues on Burnout.io’s GitHub repo to see what was needed to be done–we’d had a backlog of things that just hadn’t been done. Everything from moving away from the Pico php framework the site was using, to adding more resources for people to use.
As I started working through the issues, making my changes, and engaging with the site maintainer, I started reading back through the resources page. I was reminded that if things aren’t going to change, it’s a good idea to move on, or take a break. Unfortunately, the work of a support tech just wasn’t piquing my interest, and multiple breaks didn’t seem to solve for my being disengaged.
I started searching for a new role, both internally and externally. I wanted something that would offer more time to tinker, to create, and demand less of the “crunch through these hundreds of tickets.” That search has led me to the Customer Success Engineer role at Digital Ocean. I’m excited about what the role entails, and can’t wait to start digging in. The eagerness and newness of the role has brings with it the freedom that moving on typically brings, and the funk of the last couple of months has lifted.
That said, I can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on the last few months as I’ve tried to mitigate my burnout the last couple of months. You can look forward to me sharing some of my extracurricular non-technical endeavors. Namely, some pipe-making and shave-brush making, as well as continuing to brew beer. After all, it was homebrewing that brought me out of burnout the last time, so I’m a bit loathe to give it up.
I’ll try and share some of those in the coming weeks. Until then, cheers!
Aaron